So I was looking over my grocery bill from this weekend's trip to the store and thinking, boy there isn't much you can get for $2 or even $3 these days, let alone $1. Even the sparkling water and the parsley were 99 cents. And that got me to thinking -- what can you buy these days for 96 cents ?

a Diet Pepsia package of M&M'sa box of pasta on salea tpmC !

Dell just published a TPC-C result that is far from spectacular performance-wise. But it comes in at an amazing $.96/tpmC, setting a new record for TPC-C price performance (1). The TPC-C benchmark continues to be a popular yardstick for comparing OLTP performance. (By the way, I am looking forward to TPC-E of course but find it amusing that Sun is still trying to explain why they don't run TPC-C.)

An article came out today in The New York Times - "Study Says Computers Give Big Boosts to Productivity." Gee, I guess that's news. The point is that technology is a good investment and if you are reading this blog you have probably already seen the light. And as an investment, if cheap is your thing, you can't beat 96 cents.